Nina Nastasia

"I'm not a very good communicator, so maybe that's why I write about talking."

If you're reading this interview in the hopes that Nina Nastasia will divulge the "truth" behind her songs, you'd best look elsewhere. Better yet, you'd best look no further than the songs themselves; Nastasia is a craftsperson, not a confessor. Though we often assume that emotionally resonant music must be based in personal experience, Nastasia's sharp and vivid lyrics are the product of fierce observational intelligence honed through meticulous writing and revision. That her partner Kennan Gudjonsson also serves as an editor of sorts is no surprise; Nastasia's music is rich, precise, and purposeful. I sat down with Nastasia and Gudjonsson in their tiny but thoroughly charming Chelsea apartment to discuss touring, writing, and You Follow Me, Nastasia's excellent collaboration with drummer Jim White.

Pitchfork: The U.S. tour you did with Jim White was pretty short.

Nina Nastasia: It's not as much fun in the states.

Kennan Gudjonsson: They don't put you up, and they don't host you.

NN: [In Europe] they're really interested in you drinking their alcohol and eating their food and showing you around.

KG: Here, the promoters usually work at the club; they're just trying to fill nights.

Pitchfork: Do you get the same ingenious excuses from promoters when people don't come out to your shows in Europe?

KG: We had one in Oregon, in Portland, on our first tour. Our old saw player had joined the Cirque du Soleil, so the whole circus came to the show-- it was packed! And then at the end of the night, I went downstairs with the promoter, and he showed me the cost of promotion and everything like that, and he managed to whittle it down to where he said we owed him $230, actually. A sold out show! So we've had our share of that.

Pitchfork: And you've had better experiences in Europe, generally speaking?

KG: There's this little tiny village in Slovenia; Nina plays there for the abuse. It's a little tiny punk club. It's great! It's freezing cold…in the club, and nobody can afford to get in. And we all just get drunk, and at the end of the night [the promoter] tries to pay us, like, a hundred euros. It's one of those shows between two high-paying shows, and we go there because the crowd is such assholes. And then it turns out that they love you. They'll drag their chairs up to the front of the stage and put their feet up and start smoking.

NN: We played our first show there, and these girls just did that. And there was this moment where I turned around, and I was just like, "They fucking hate us, let's just finish this and go." And we finished, and they wouldn't let us get off the stage. Apparently, they really liked it.

KG: But there's a challenge, it's like, "Show us something."

NN: Every time it's like that.

KG: Also, they're drunk off their asses. Nina played a show once, and this guy came up with a giant silver corrugated tube, and he's takes out this tape, and it's going SHRRRRRRK and then tacks up this sign. And apparently the sign says "respect the band," and people are supposed to throw money in the tube! But that was one of those shows where it's like, "There's no way you're paying us for this."

NN: They can barely keep the place going. There was some nastiness in Ireland, wasn't there?

KG: They tried to pay our drummer, and offered him half as much! And then he said we weren't indie enough.

Pitchfork: Like, aesthetically, or what?

KG: Because we weren't cool.

NN: Because we wouldn't take half the money.

KG: Yeah, it was that! He said, "You don't represent the values of Touch and Go." He was a big T&G fan.

Pitchfork: Ahh yes, the people who are fans of people in your orbit, but not of yours, and expect you to live up to those expectations.

NN: And they do have some ridiculous expectations.

KG: And we love [Touch and Go].

NN: There's definitely a code; an indie code.

KG: There's a clique.

Pitchfork: I think it's like that in a lot of regional indie rock scenes. Do you get lots of weirdness about the Steve Albini connection, too?

NN: Actually, most of the people in that world are so nice.

Pitchfork: Most of the recording engineers I've met are very nice, patient and down-to-earth people.

NN: It's funny, he has this reputation for being such an asshole. Journalists I talk to all want to get a scoop on what an asshole he is. And he's probably the most moral guy I've worked with. He just doesn't kiss ass, he's not trying to make anyone feel good.

KG: It's funny, I don't know how he does it, he's a magician. He's a super guy, and he knows everyone in Chicago, and he's called a douchebag like three-fourths of the time.

NN: He's got a great way of speaking about pretty much anything.

KG: At his core, he knows what he believes, so he can be articulate about anything. Whereas my policy is, "I dunno, man..." Which I feel is almost as noble as that.

Pitchfork: Unless you do know and you're not saying. Everybody I know who's worked with him says he's a great guy to work with.

KG: Even if he hates their music.

Pitchfork: I think a lot of people don't understand how hard it is to record bands, how challenging it can be to sit there with however many people who are convinced that they're making the best record of all time even if they're not prepared and don't really know what they're doing.

NN: I imagine they get a lot of bands who might not know what they're getting into recording live. You really have to be able to go in and play well. He doesn't like to do take after take after take; he likes to do three takes and you're done. Though we've broken that rule.

KG: Well, not because it's a race against time; he'll work till 3 a.m.-- you can torture him! It's because he knows it's not gonna get any better.

NN: And he's right in that way. He did a really great thing for me. When I first went into the studio to do Dogs, I was so nervous. I had never done a record, and I wasn't even really a musician. So I couldn't play very well, and I was just really concentrating on being perfect. And we'd do a take and he'd be like, "that's awesome!" And there would be some buzz or some fucked up thing on the guitar that I was obsessing on, and he says, "no, that's what's great about it-- that's what makes it unique!" It was really helpful for me to hear that.

KG: We opened for Shellac in New York once; and the crowd was so great! They were so receptive, such a cool crowd.

Pitchfork: I was at that show! Everybody had come from really far-off places to see Shellac, and they were all so excited. Older indie rock crowds don't seem to be as aesthetically compartmentalized as some of the younger crowds, they're into different things.

KG: Somehow, they intuitively know that Shellac have a hand in their support, too. Most of the time it isn't like that, so people just ignore the support.

NN: I did get some looks, though. A girl coming out with an acoustic guitar...

Pitchfork: Those opening slots can be really tough, where people have already decided that they're only fans of the headliner.

NN: I did one support show, and it felt kind of like there was nothing I could do. They were polite enough, but still...

KG: We know that people are like, "I'm into this kind of music, I'm not into this kind of music," but I don't think it's all that different now. We never really wanted to do support shows like that.

NN: They were impractical. They didn't pay that well, and I had a big band, and a lot of the time, it's just a bad experience because nobody's listening.

We started out curating shows. So we would set up the whole night, and that's how we did it from the very beginning. It would be a whole night of stuff we liked and wanted to be a part of.

Pitchfork: You brought up the arranging process; I was struck by how economical and purposeful You Follow Me is. How did it come to be so streamlined?

NN: We rented a studio and, the three of us basically-- I ran through the songs and we would play them and record different takes. And then Kennan would go home with the recordings-- Jim did too, actually-- and he'd piece together what worked. The song was done, and we'd do these different takes and Jim would play around with different things.

KG: Sometimes we'd actually take the recordings and take different recordings of things that Jim had done and just piece them together.

NN: And sometimes we'd just hear something and go, "Yeah, just keep that." That was the first time we worked that way.

KG: We'd chop it to little pieces and then give it back to Jim. He's a very intuitive player, and he could turn something around every time, interpret the song differently. And it's always cool. My focus is always on the words, making sure the words are placed and that the shape of the song isn't diminished. There are certain parts, certain ways the narrative has to flow with the music in order for it to sound like a narrative. But Jim sometimes goes by something about Nina's dynamics in the playing, or Jim instigates a dynamic change. Great drummers don't usually instigate a dynamic change, but he can just knock over a fucking coffee table in the middle of the cocktail party. He's the guy who goes, "fucking let's do something about this shit." And you have to step up! It's really great.

NN: And he wanted it to be very precise, very specific. He didn't want to improvise.

Pitchfork: Did the words change at all after the songs were arranged?

NN: No.

KG: There is kind of a perception that this was a very different process of the other records, but it wasn't. Nina wrote the songs, she rehearsed them, Jim improvised over the songs, I put my two cents in. The difference is that we rehearsed a lot this time.

NN: Also, there's a lot of focus on Jim. Jim kind of cast equal focus on that record.

KG: And also, Jim wanted to be the whole band. He wanted to really not limit his palate at all. That's the biggest difference with how he played. He was like, "I want it to be cheaper for Nina to tour! I could take the more melodic parts of the rest of the band." And I think he did that.

Pitchfork: He's so melodic, and so emotional, too. He can say a lot with just one really well-placed hit.

NN: We did get some people who were like, "What the hell is this?"

KG: In America, this album has gotten the best press. In England, it's gotten the worst press. The Independent called it "a dog's breakfast." We kinda felt like, "We've arrived, now!"

Pitchfork: I think a lot of people have trouble interpreting Nina's music; there's this expectation that female singers will either be totally ballsy or totally fragile. Does that get to you, or have you separated yourself from it?

NN: I've separated myself a bit. I think it gets...you start to do shows and people come up to me and say, "I wish more people were here, how come more people aren't here?" and that just starts to get a little. But yeah, in order to survive that whole thing I just separate myself it.

KG: Nina had never heard Cat Power before she started getting compared to her; she had never heard PJ Harvey, either. We just weren't in the music world that much. So it was a bit like...Wow, it's a pretty sexist world! Females are just compared to females.

I don't think she sounds anything like Cat Power or PJ Harvey, whatsoever. It used to make us really angry...or at least, annoyed, but I understand it.

NN: I'm very distant from that. I find it very hard to be in the game, you know? It kills a lot of inspiration when you start getting involved with that part of the business.

Pitchfork: I think that's also a need to essentialize the talents of female singers, to take the emphasis away from the craft and the songwriting. Nina, I think you have a perfectly nice voice, but I'm always kind of surprised when I read something about how you have this totally, totally amazing singing voice...

NN: I'm always shocked by that! I'm not the singer, I'm the songwriter who sings.

Pitchfork: Part of what I'm really interested in with your music is the way that you sing about talking, you sing about communication.

NN: I'm not a very good communicator, so maybe that's why I write about talking.

Pitchfork: It seems different to me from the way a lot of singers operate though-- there's more room for things to be half-said or not said at all.

NN: I'm a big fan of things in writing in general that are subtle, that suggest something without actually in-your-face saying it. So I think maybe that's why. And it's funny, I've started to notice it, I started to see it after a while, that that's kind of a way of writing that I was doing. But I didn't set about to do that.